Circles
by Azula Always Lies
Summary: Three weeks after Sozin's Comet, Zuko visits Azula in the asylum, and she has a lot to say.


**Circles**

He came because he had to. That was all.

Not for her. Not because she'd asked for him, _insisted_ he come; not because she was relentless, harassing her staff at every turn. Not because he'd been told she was desperate. He'd have just as soon let her shriek her throat raw, jerk at stubborn chains, work herself into a fit of smoke and seizure. He'd have let her howl like a mad wolf, until she realized it was in vain—until she ceased to fight, flung out her final swipe. Until she was drained of force, and rebellion, and spat her last spark from dry lips. If he didn't have to, he'd never have come.

But he did. Azula's commands were one thing; her staff's pleas were another. He couldn't turn a deaf ear when they came to him, chalk-faced, rings beneath their eyes. She was a terror, they said, and getting worse – a hostile, mutinous beast, never silent, never still. She wouldn't tire, through sheer force of will. Of course they'd _thought_ she might yield, they said – thought she _must_, having been at it for days – they'd thought that surely, surely in time she'd sleep, surely soon she would break and black out from fatigue. But she was tenacious. And with one look, he could tell they would crack first.

The girl who let him in was contrite, shoes tapping down the hall to the tune of her apologies. Her keys clattered, clicking in door after door, and all the while she was sorry; dreadfully sorry, she said, for pestering him so. They should have been able to deal with this. It was hardly their practice, she assured him, to take orders from patients. It was just that they'd already lost three orderlies, who'd chosen to quit rather than endure Azula – it was just that they couldn't run a staffless aslyum, and that was what they'd be before long. They had no choice.

After awhile Zuko raised a hand, and she was silent. In so many words, she was saying what he'd known for years: Azula always got her way.

She didn't enter the cell with him. Instead, the girl unlocked its door and vanished, before his first taste of ash in the air; in her wake, the room filled with the _clang_ of steel on steel. Eyes slit, Zuko looked down at his sister, or what remained of her in this ravaged shell. Like glass dashed against concrete, she lay on the ground in pieces, a pale bony puppet whose strings had been snapped. Her arms were bound in canvas, her ankles fettered—she was latched to a chain, by a strap around her waist, and it was bolted to the wall. He could see where she'd broken her nails off in the stone.

She was battered, grime and blood-smeared, thick with the smell of soot. Speckled in watercolor bruises. Beneath the jacket, her chest heaved a thin, stuttering pulse; beneath her bangs, her eyes burned low.

"This seems," she said, "an inappropriate time."

Even unhinged, she was eloquent. Naturally. "Well, doesn't it?" she went on, when he didn't respond. "You should have come at night. We should be doing this by moonlight, preferably a nice, thin beam spilling through the window…we should be drenched in shadows. You should be—like a ghost in the darkness, barely there. So I'd think my eyes were playing tricks." Her gaze shifted to the window, high and steel-barred, flush with midday sun. Dust motes spun in the glow. "I can't believe you, Zuko. Showing up like this. You've gone and spoiled the mood."

He said nothing. She waited awhile, watching him, eyes like coals in a dying fire. Eventually they rolled upwards, to the ceiling, as she peeled her face from the stone; one by one, snarls of hair came loose with it, matted and half-twined into the floor. A sigh rattled her chest. "It's horrid in here, you know. Not that you'd care, but—you ought to know.

"I'm so bored. It's only been three weeks, and already I'm so _bored _– I've counted the cobwebs in the rafters sixty times. Or sixty thousand. Why would it matter? How would I know?" She pressed her lips shut and tasted blood, welling up coppery in their cracks. "I feel like a pig. Haven't bathed in weeks. My hair is gross, because they don't wash it—they don't even _brush _it—and of course there's no mirror here, so I don't how I look, but I'd place my bet on ghastly. Can't remember the last time I wore makeup. Who'd have guessed I'd miss lipstick so much?"

She gave a weak laugh—less a laugh than a bitter breath, the hard-edged hiss of a smirk. "But I suppose nobody cares. No one cares how I look now, least of all these people. No one cares if it's always—so _cold_ in here, like a damn icebox—no one cares if I'm getting a rash from these irons. If this straitjacket's crushing my ribs. If I dropped dead, nobody'd notice for a week – and even once they did, no one would care."

Her bangs fluttered, stirred by a long, low breath from her nose. Zuko grit his teeth. "Was this all you wanted?" he snapped. "To complain?"

"Oh, come on," she said lightly, rolling her eyes. "Cut me some slack. It's been _ages_ since I've had someone to talk to; can't you feel just a little sorry for me, Zuzu?"

"It's Firelord Zuko now."

He saw a tic seize her face. A sharp, shuddering twitch, wrenching her mouth upwards, halfway between a snarl and a sneer. Her teeth, dull though they were, shone like knives. "I would sooner slit my own throat," she answered, very sweetly, "than call _you _by Father's title."

"Then I have no further business here."

He didn't think twice. Chest tight, eyes cold, Zuko turned before she could start again, and nearly jerked the door from its hinges; after all, he'd made his best effort. He felt more than entitled to leave. Blood was only so thick, he knew, and his patience only so strong—and the door had a gratifying shriek to it, a sweet scrape of metal over stone—and—he could ignore it, if she spoke. When. Never mind the panic in her voice, when she cried _wait_, _wait! _Never mind how shrill, how hoarse the words were, hitting all the wrong notes. Never mind that there was _fear_ in those words, and it left his mouth coated sour – that she sounded, for all the world, like a little girl. Like a child, left to the mercy of the monsters beneath her bed. He could ignore her. Even if it made his stomach turn.

"_Please! _I—I—" She couldn't stand but she sat up, face the color of frost, eyes black specks swimming in white. "I'm _sorry_, okay? But you can't leave, Zuko. You can't. You can't. You can't."

She saw his grip tighten on the doorframe. Suddenly, it seemed absolutely _vital_ that he stay, as though she would die if he left—suddenly, tremors raced through her body, and all she could say was _you_ _can't._ Over and over again. As if a gear had slipped in her mind. _You can't. You can't. You can't. _

"You can't go, not now, not yet, I _did_ have a reason I asked you here and you can't, you _can't _leave before I say what I have to say because I have to say it, Zuko, I have to say it to somebody other than myself, somebody real, someone who'll listen, someone who won't—disappear when the light shifts." In her chest, Azula's heart fluttered like a caged bird, wild and desperate. "Listen, this is important. You can't leave."

"Why?"

The word wasn't kind, but it was something. He didn't leave just yet. "Because I know what you think of me," she said. "I know how—you must see me now. I made a fool of myself back there." She swallowed hard, eyes sealed shut behind a tattered veil of hair. Struggled to even her voice. "They say I've lost my mind. They keep—telling me I'm crazy, and it's not true, but I know _why_—I—_disgraced_ myself, in the end. Thrashing and frothing like an animal. Like a savage, like—some awful, rabid thing—I'll never forget."

Something like a smile splintered her face again, ugly and weak. She saw Zuko glance back at her, for a moment, without turning – caught the wary glint of his slit eye – and her sinew slackened. Muscle unwound, slick with cool sweat, but she'd crossed a line – there was no more feigning nerve. "I never understood you," she said faintly. "All your talk of honor. You can't feel it til it's gone, I guess—until you're on your knees, chained to a grate. Cored by a blade no one else can see. Until you're sick with the fire inside, coming up like bad milk—until everything comes down around you, falling, falling, and _you_ don't know you're screaming, but—but you must be, because the sound splits your throat. Until you're nothing but a wreck in armor. A peeled wet heap of bones and breath." A chill crawled over her at the memory, all needles and sand. "You don't know, I guess. Until suddenly you do. And it's too late."

The last part snapped off brittle, almost too soft to hear. Her eyes, leaden of lid and streaked with veins, never left his. "But it wasn't my fault, okay? You have to know that. Even if—if you keep me here forever, caged like a beast—even if I shamed myself, and I _know_ I did, you can't _lie _and say it's because I'm crazy. You have to know that. I have to tell you." Just then, a swell of nausea gripped her stomach. For a moment, she thought she'd be sick with the memory, sick with the shame. "It's just—you'll have to forgive me, okay, for not having the words for losing everything. For not—_scripting_ that moment, planning it, like I thought it would come. You think I planned to end up here, Zuko? You think I planned to end the war in—in _fetters_, and a straitjacket? You think I drafted my surrender?

"Of course not." She would've spat out a laugh, if she hadn't thought she'd vomit first. "Do you know how it is? You can't. Do you know—how it feels to lose everything, _everything_—all in one blow, one strike? One swipe of a peasant girl's hand? Do you know how it feels to watch, trapped in ice, while everything you've built turns to dust? What it's like to be helpless – such an ugly word – helpless, _helpless_, useless, hopeless, better off dead? For the first time in my life!" Suddenly her voice hit a raw peak, dropped the question. Fell just as fast. "Do you know how it is, to have nothing left but screaming?"

And finally—_finally_—he turned. She'd managed to strike him, she thought, and the roil inside eased to a simmer; she'd never have said so, but at this point just his face was calming. It was good to have something familiar. His eyes were dark, yes, and hard as gems, and maybe they didn't quite see her, not entirely, maybe he didn't get it but it was good to look at him, still, someone she knew, one thing the same. Zuko would always be Zuko, she thought, with those eyes too soft even now, with his brow in a near-constant crease – with that scar like a red plume, the single spread wing of a flightless bird. One thing always the same.

He watched her for a short time, quiet. He watched her and she didn't flinch, didn't look down, only held his sunless solemn eyes, honey-gold, one narrower than the other— "Yes," he said at last, silencing her mind. "I do."

And then she saw.

Maybe she was stupid. Maybe this place had made her so. Maybe this cell, like a vise, had crushed her—juiced the marrow from her bones, the wit from her mind—maybe it was a beast that had bitten her, lanced her skull with its fangs and sapped her sense. Left her a brainless husk. It was all she could think of, stupid, _stupid _girl, stupid girl—how else could she forget? What else was there to say, but that she'd been stupid, and selfish – well, of _course_ she'd been selfish – and she hadn't thought of him, she never did. She had thought, spitefully, _let him look at me now and condemn me, here in the darkest lowest place. _She had thought, bitterly, _at least he will have to pity me now. _

She had never thought, even once in her life, _he and I are the same._

There came a slow, warming ache in Azula's head, pooling somewhere beyond her nose. Thickening her breath, glazing her eyes. She recalled it, from that last day, the pinprick pressure of tears—but she _would not_ cry, not in front of him, not again. She bit down hard on her lip. There was a little lovely pain, a beautiful bright blinding pain, the taste of blood filling a web of cracks; she could smell it, like a copper coin, and feel it rolling down her chin. Two red beads – first one, then another – hit the floor.

She could have said, _you're wrong. _But he wasn't.

She could have said, _it was different for you. _But it wasn't.

She could have said, _you look stupid in that crown. _But he didn't, really. And it wouldn't have helped.

Azula had never been one for empathy. She knew people well enough to use them, but beyond that opened a gulf—a dark, bottomless lacuna, through which no compassion would pass. It took root of its own accord. Grew in her like a weed, like a virus, until she saw no one but herself. Until she and the void were one, inseverable, and nothing of her could have crossed it if she'd wanted to – what was there to bridge the gap, after all? After all of these years, after all her mistakes, after all the blood shed and the ties cut? It wasn't so easy. Standing there, on the lip of the abyss, gazing into the mile-long fault in her own heart she _saw_—understood, for the first time—that she'd have to rend _herself._ All she had left. If she crossed, she would cross on a net of tendons, snapped in slick handfuls from her bones.

"It gets better with time."

Zuko's voice reached her as though through a long tunnel, the weakest, softest semblance of sound. So gentle it hurt. She shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut—sucked in the sweet tang of blood. "Maybe for you."

The words came out a whisper. She didn't know if he'd heard them – she'd barely heard herself – but a moment later, there came footsteps. The door opened again, and shut, and she heard the bolt clank, and for all she knew he might have been a mirage. A ghost, or a shard of a dream. For all she knew, she'd spent her life here, congealed like a mold on these damp stones; maybe Zuko was a dream and so was the world he lived in, the past that seemed so far away. Maybe this was all there was. No war, no glory, no fatal flaw to shatter her like glass. Only this cell. Forever.

Azula's tide ebbed. She dropped to the ground, and stared with glazed eyes at the wall. She tried to call up a breath of fire, just a lick, just to remind herself she could – just to stave off this ice, clotting cold in her veins – but there was nothing. And she felt nothing. And she saw nothing. And she was a carcass, full of aimless need, and maybe people couldn't breathe fire anyway; maybe that was just another lie she'd told herself, for fifteen years. Maybe the world was a web of concentric circles, spinning in a black sky.

Outside, Zuko spoke to no one. Like a ghost, like a shard of a dream he slipped away, without seeking out the staff; there was nothing he could have said. Other than, _she won't give you any more trouble, _and he didn't know; maybe she would. Other than, _send for me_ _if she starts again, _and he wasn't sure; he might not want to know. Other than, _do you think you might brush her hair?_

But no. He'd come because he had to. That was all.


End file.
